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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (237600)	7/24/2007 12:59:44 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Just in case anybody is "reality-based" enough to believe your stupidities, here is a quote from that right-wing rag, The Washington Post: How Close Did Iraq Come? In The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind (Wiley, $24.95), a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi, describes in jaw-dropping detail how Iraq acquired the means to produce highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient to building a nuclear weapon, by the eve of the first Gulf War. Had Saddam Hussein not made the fatal mistake of invading Kuwait in August 1990, he probably would have possessed a crude atomic bomb by 1992 or 1993, insulating his regime from the threat of foreign invasion. Relatively unknown in the West until recently, Obeidi was the Iraqi scientist responsible for developing a gas centrifuge, the most direct and efficient route to enriching uranium. After U.N. arms inspectors forced Iraq to close its nuclear weapons program following the 1991 Gulf War, he buried a prototype of his centrifuge in his backyard in Baghdad (hence his book's title). After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, Obeidi turned over this last remnant of the Iraqi nuclear program to the United States and teamed up with American reporter Kurt Pitzer to write this book. The result offers insights into how a determined dictator, backed by sufficient resources, can come within reach of acquiring the world's most horrific weapons. It is a tale of cruelty and ruthlessness on the part of Hussein but also of naiveté and greed on the part of Western scientists who enabled Iraq to take shortcuts toward becoming a nuclear power. Obeidi's early centrifuge experiments ended in failure in January 1988. But with the help of American, French and above all German scientists, he was able to create a reliable prototype by the spring of 1990, paving the way to mass production of enriched uranium. One German scientist, Bruno Stemmler, sold Iraq samples of many of the components of a centrifuge for just over a million dollars. A mysterious English-Pakistani businessman identified only as Malik agreed to provide 100 tons of high-grade hardened steel for $7 million. By Obeidi's calculations, this was enough steel to produce sufficient enriched uranium for 10 Hiroshima-type bombs a year. If a relatively well-off German scientist was willing to sell the key components of a centrifuge for $1 million, imagine how little it costs to bribe a desperately poor Russian or Ukrainian. Who's Next? Among the jarring juxtapositions in The Bomb in My Garden are the contrasts between the macabre nature of the nuclear-weapons trade and the reassuring surroundings in which the transactions took place: a tea shop in the London suburb of Wimbledon, a nightclub off the Champs-Elysées in Paris, a four-star hotel in Bonn. By Michael Dobbs Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co All Rights Reserved. -- amazon.com